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Geraldine Wojno Kiefer writes about Sadakichi Hartmann, an American Impressionist who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a German father. His mother had passed away soon after his birth and Sadakichi was reared in Hamburg, Germany, home of his paternal uncle, a wealthy aesthete who encouraged his precociousness and early love of literature and the arts.

Through a series of colorful twists and turns, Sadakichi ended up in the United States, completing his education in libraries and museums and utilizing the income from printing and writing jobs to finance periodic trips back to Europe. There, particularly through his encounters with Jules Laforgue, Henri de Regnier, and other writers in Mallarme’s Paris circle (entree into which was provided by American poet Stuart Merrill in 1892), Hartmann absorbed a substantial dose of Symbolist literary theory and psychology.

Expanding sensate form to sensate experience, Hartmann defined his version of Impressionist sensibility:

It is not the glorification of classic form, but of an abstract idea… It produces instantaneously a tangled mass of sensations; this is the first impression, vague and vacillating but intense, and thereupon slowly, with the help of our intellect, do we arrive at a clear and distinct pleasure. We repeat the same process of soul activity which the statue represents.